It’s okay to be different – from bird to chameleon

I didn’t plan this twirly headed chameleon like guy, but he obviously wanted to be noticed and popped up out of the blue in my mixed media painting.

What can I say? I had been looking jealously at on line friends playing with doodles, ink splats and mixed media, and I just had to join in the fun. So when Anne turned up to play with me (because you are never too old for a playdate), we pulled out boxes of paints, papers, glues, stencils and pens and covered the kitchen table with a polka dotted plastic tablecloth so we could splatter as much as we liked without worrying about mess. As if I worry anyway 🙂

We did have a plan – promise. We were going to collage birds on to a page, and that is definitely how it started. I had even drawn my bird. He looked a bit like a parakeet to start with. but then he grew a very long, un-bird-like tail. Which had to twirl at the end – of course. As the layers started to build up the colours changed, as they always do. A tree branch grew, and flowers bloomed. Then they melted back into the branch, giving it added strength. The parakeet shyly tucked his head down under his feathers, and his sleek feathers suddenly smoothed into a sleek, rounded body – which started to look like a tadpole. Where on earth had the tadpole come from?? Funnily enough, Master Tadpole struggled to hang on to the branch, so he grew frog legs – as tadpoles do.

The feathers on the parakeet’s crown turned into a handsome twirly hairdo any unidentified amphibian could be proud of. He wanted to dress up a little more, so he claimed some spots to finish off the look. I don’t know where he came from, this twirly headed chameleon like guy – but there was no way I could possibly turn him away.

When a little character asserts himself into my artwork like this I figure they come with a message. And maybe that message is about recognising and celebrating difference. And acceptance. And change.